Winterlong (54 page)

There was not a sound, not a breath, in that place. I felt as though even the freezing air had fallen away; I felt nothing, nothing at all.

“Wendy?” he asked, so softly that I almost could not hear him. He reached one hand to touch me, his fingers sliding from my wrist to my arm. Maybe I did not really hear him, maybe it was only that I knew what he would say, perhaps the name had been fluttering in my mind waiting only for him to say it. Not Aidan Arent but Wendy Wanders. Not a solitary wanderer but Raphael’s sister; not a research subject but a real girl. He stared where his fingers stroked my arm, marveling, shut his eyes for a moment as he traced the crook of my elbow.

“You’re just like me.” He pulled me closer, until our faces almost touched. I could smell the blood on him, the breath of poison that had claimed Justice. I wanted to draw away from him but could not. To see him like this, to touch him for the first time; to realize that it was true, that all these years there had been this other part of me, this changeling boy living in the City of Trees, and never knowing it, never knowing me; never knowing him. He stroked my face, took my hand, lifted it so that I could see our fingers entwined and the same thin wrists, the same broken nails and slender fingers, then pulling back my other sleeve to show me my arm, his arm, the veins like new young vines and their patterns both the same. He dropped my hand and gazed into my eyes once more.

“You are so beautiful,” he whispered. And staring at him I nodded, and murmured his name; because it was so. I glimpsed the beauty that had held the City in sway, the sweetness in his features beneath their film of blood; the high cheekbones and gray eyes that, had they not been so striated by fatigue and madness, would have been lovelier than any eyes I had ever seen, lovely eyes, eyes I dared not meet in dreams, the eyes of the Boy in the tree…

And suddenly I saw it, saw Him; suddenly I knew that
this
was what Miss Scarlet had glimpsed at our first meeting, and knew at last what it was those others had seen through me:

A demon, a god. Revenant and revered one, the eternal victim and He who holds the knife. A boy of unearthly beauty, different from the One who had haunted me but also the same, as Raphael was like me and yet not me; as though Raphael’s corporeal body had been transformed and this other one shone through him as though he were a beaker of clear water. As I gazed into those eyes I knew that He had found His final place, He had found His way into the world. I had been an imperfect vessel; Raphael Miramar had become His ideal host.

“Wendy. My sister—”

He drew my face to his and kissed me. For one instant I felt in him a spark of something that was neither hatred nor desire but perhaps relief, and peace. Then he groaned, turned so that his cheek crushed against mine. His eyes clenched shut as though to keep from seeing some horror beside him. His hands clutched my side, his tongue slipped between my lips as he pulled me tight against him.

“No—” I cried, trying to pull away.

But in this, at least, he was different: he was stronger than I was. I fought and bit, tried to scratch at him, went mad thinking,
This is the one who killed him, this is the one who murdered Justice;
but it was no use. Neither hatred nor will nor force could shake him from me. My struggle only aroused him more until finally I kicked him, knocking him aside for a moment as I fell. I staggered to my feet. He threw himself against me and knocked me down, then grabbing my shoulders forced me back and smashed my head against the earth, so hard that it felt as though he had taken a knife to my temple. I nearly passed out from the pain; perhaps I did …

Because now there is a thrumming in the air, a sound like wind in the leaves or something else, a sound I have never heard, not in Waking; only perhaps in dreams. The sound of waves returning to some distant shore, the sound of voices chanting. Gradually their words become clear:

We came upon Baal

Stricken on the ground:

Mot had slain him. We cried,

“Puissant Baal is dead,

The Prince, Lord of Earth, is perished.”

Our lamentation wakes Anat.

She descends from the throne,

Pours’ dust of mourning on her head.

In her face she cuts a gash with a stone,

She gashes her cheeks and her chin,

She plows her breast like a garden,

Harrows her back like a plain. She lifts up her voice and cries:

“Baal’s dead!—what becomes of our people?

What becomes of the earth?

After Baal I’ll descend into earth.”

Anat goes and wanders

Every mount to the heart of the earth,

Every hill to the earth’s very bowels.

She comes to the Wasteland

To the horror of Mot’s field.

She comes upon Baal

Stricken on the ground.

Then weeps she her fill of weeping;

Deep she drinks tears, like wine.

Loudly she calls

Unto the Mother above.

“Lift Puissant Baal, I pray,

Onto me.”

The Mother wakes.

She picks up Puissant Baal,

Sets him upon his sister’s shoulder.

Anat lifts up her voice and cries:

“Now will I sit and rest,

And my soul be at ease in my breast.

For alive is Puissant Baal,

My brother, king of the earth.”

When I open my eyes once more I see him above me, his hands tight about my shoulders as he thrusts against me, grunting, his face contorted into a mask of such despair and terror that I try to turn my head so as not to see it, not to see him, my own face there above me in the throes of such torment as I can no longer imagine, a horror even worse than mine at being ravaged by him.

But He is too strong; I cannot look away…

And suddenly they are there with me, all of them: Morgan Yates with her face pressed against a bloodstained window, Emma Harrow staring as her brother’s body twists slowly from a leather belt, Jane Alopex recoiling as He turns to her and extends His hand, Fabian a gray wraith twisting in the night. Just as suddenly they are gone. I am alone. It is me there, for one moment my own face hangs above me in the darkness, not Raphael but Wendy. Then he tosses back his head and cries out: a scream that echoes from the walls and is taken up by those who watch, until the air is filled with it: a shriek of such horror and misery and loathing that it deafens me, and I shut my eyes so as not to see the anguished face that would make such a sound.

It is over. He rolls from me and lies prostrate upon the blackened earth. I turn onto my side to stare at him, reach to touch him: my consort, my enemy, my brother. He does not move; he lies there as though dead.

A shadow falls across his face. Dimly I become aware of other sounds; cries and the sound of fighting, metal against metal, granite crushing bone. There is a smell of burning, of flesh. Above me stands the Aviator. Blood slicks his arm and hand, and he holds a piece of metal like a bloodied scythe.

“Kill him!” a voice shrilled. I twisted to see Oleander hanging from a spike beside the ladder, his face contorted as his arms flailed. Blood frothed from his mouth as he strove to free himself.
“The missiles
—
he will destroy us all—kill him!”

His hand flopped against his side. With his last bit of strength he pulled a knife from the folds of his trousers and tossed it. It skittered across the floor and halted beside my brother’s body.

With a roar Tast’annin leaped from where he swayed above me. Stumbling against the ladder he raised his arm, the light blazing crimson from his scythe as it struck at the boy’s neck. For one instant Oleander’s mouth mirrored Tast’annin’s own, a frozen mask of loathing and horror; then with a rush of blood his head toppled from his shoulders.

“Kill him?” shouted Tast’annin. But no one seemed to hear him but me. Everywhere lazars ran blindly, scrabbling at ropes and ladders, kicking as they fought to climb the walls of the pit. “Kill him? No one can kill him! It is the Final Ascension: he will rise again!” His voice rose to a scream, bubbling from his twisted mouth so that I could not be certain what words I heard and what I only imagined in my delirium. “He is not dead, he doth but sleep—”

Then there was a flash of light. The generator exploded with a hollow sound, showering me with sparks. Tast’annin disappeared in the shadows. There was only torchlight and a few sullen candles glowing fitfully above the melee.

I turned dully to stare at the stricken form on the ground in front of me: so like myself I might have aligned my body beside his, the two of us forming twin curves of a human arabesque, gray eyes deadened, tawny hair a wasted wave upon this bleak shingle, our broken limbs entwined cold and unmoving. Raphael Miramar. Neither god nor Gaping One: only my brother given to the dark.

“Kill him,”
another Voice whispered. I lifted my head; but Tast’annin had forgotten me. I heard him growling as he lunged and struck at something in the dark.

—
Kill him, Wendy.

The yellow points of the lazars’ torches guttered and went out. With them it seemed the very voices of the lazars died. A terrible silence encloaked me, although I could still see the wraithlike figures of the damned children soundlessly spinning about the abyss, contorted like insects trapped in a lamp. Even the pounding of my heart stilled. For a moment I thought,
We are all dead.

Then, from the charred ground in front of me a brilliant white flame leaped up like a fountain, a flame with neither heat nor color besides that painful argent. The stench of rotting flesh arose with it. I blinked and shielded my eyes and mouth.

—
Oh, Wendy,
the flame sighed. The brilliant light danced and faded to a harsher yellow, then began to shape itself into a more substantial form. Slowly it rose and fell, as though trying to draw strength from the freezing air.

—
Poor Wendy! Alone now, you are truly alone
—

—But I can still hear you, Small Voice, I said in surprise. If I am alone you must be gone—

—
No. I am still here, for the moment. Kill him, Wendy. He is an abomination; you cannot both live. Kill Raphael.

With difficulty I turned from the flame; it seemed to will me to stare at it, be consumed by it. But I looked back down at the boy lying there. So frail now, and white. His eyes were closed but I knew that even if he opened them there would be no light there, no reflected glory to mad’den me, no maenad’s Dionysus there now but only a broken shell.

—
Kill him,
hissed the flame.
There is a knife, take it and kill him!

I nodded and reached for the knife Oleander had thrown: a golden knife with a curved blade, so keen the light refracted from its edge in dazzling waves of blue and white. I held it a long time. It seemed to have no weight at all in my hand.

—
Kill him,
the flame repeated.
Kill him, Wendy.
Each time it leaped higher beside me.

—Be quiet, I commanded it. I was trying to remember something, something the Boy had told me at the Zoo:

We will meet again … but you may not remember my names. Although perhaps by then you will recall your own …

—
Your name?
the flame screamed.
Your name? You know it now! Kali is your name, and Athena; and Morgan and Mayuel; Clytemnestra and Artemis and Hecate!

“No,” I said suddenly. I recalled that strange sound, a noise like waves, like many women chanting. “I am Anat, the consort of my brother Baal. But I am also Wendy Wanders, the lover of Justice Saint-Alaban.

“I am the Magdalene.”

I stared down at him, the bright one broken, my own face stricken and bloodless before me, Raphael Miramar, Aidan Harrow, the Hanged Boy: my beautiful brother in the dark.

And there came to me then a great sound, the sound of singing. And I saw all of them, Emma and Aidan, Gligor and Merle and Anna, Dr. Silverthorn and Toby Rhymer, a white dog with eyes like burning ice and a girl who longed to fly with finches, all of them like lights dancing in the air. With them shrilled the voices of the lazars like wounds bleeding song, all of them crying out to me. Loudest of all was the piercing cry of a boy with fair tangled hair and green eyes, his hands streaming through the darkness like the purest moonlight and his eyes two burning stars. And the song they sang had only one note and one sound and one word, and the word they sang was Death; the song they sang was Supplication to slay him there where he lay with his white throat awaiting the knife, his eyes shut against the blade. And the song they sang went on and on and on, their voices grew higher and louder until the sky whirled with them and the stars began to wink out one by one. And within me I felt my heart wither, and the knife Oleander had tossed me grew heavy and cold in my fist as I raised it above my brother.

As abruptly as it had begun the singing ceased. I heard only a dull hissing from the flame still flickering before me. I stared at the golden blade in my hand, then carefully looked around. Where the flame leaped a fissure had opened, a black pit that descended endlessly into the earth. Unsteadily I got to my feet. I walked to the edge of the pit and stared down into it. Then I dropped the knife.

For a. moment it seemed to hang in the air, blindingly golden, a scythe or perhaps a crescent moon. Then it fell, its light extinguished. With a shriek that deepened to a thundering roar the flame leaped as though it would consume us all, leaped until the sky vanished as though behind a curtain of light. The flame dwindled, and finally disappeared. I blinked, trying to adjust to the darkness, and walked to my stricken brother.

Something moved behind me. I whirled around, and there stood Miss Scarlet, rubbing her arms where the ropes had fallen from them. Only with her bonds it seemed that the dark hair had fallen from her arms and face so that they gleamed like smooth brown glass, and she stepped delicately from a shriveled thing like a filthy robe of fur and walked toward me. And though I knew her face it was changed. Instead of the shrunken features of a wizened monkey I saw now that she was a woman, and suddenly it seemed to me that she had
always
been a woman. It had been myself that was the blind animal, and my own eyes had never seen before the colors that the world showed to me now, the colors that Miss Scarlet Pan saw as well and laughed to see.